Cathy's Art Diary

Intriguing lecture at the National Portrait Gallery using works from the gallery to talk about sex in the Victorian era. Catherine Philips of The University of Bristol introduced us to a number of radical Victorian thinkers both campaigning for rights of sex workers of the time or introducing laws to limit sexual freedoms starting with Charles 'Boatswain' Smith, a Baptist minister in Stepney who established a refuge for sex workers, educating them to be domestic servants and finding them jobs with families moving out to the colonies. She moved on to Josephine Butler and Dadodhal Naoroji who fought to overturn the Contagious Diseases Acts and Annie Besant who republished a pamphlet of sexual education for which she was charged under the Obscene Publications Act. She then looked at Henry Labouchere who introduced the law to criminalise all male homosexual activity in the UK and Sir Richard Francis Burton who wrote about sexual practices he came across when travelling and t...

Intriguing exhibition at the British Museum examining the history of the Samurai. It was a beautifully designed show and covered from their origins in medieval Japan's civil wars through to the 19th century when they had become the elite, cultured ruling class. It also looked at their myths and l egacy. My only moan is, that as ever at the British Museum, the labels were quite long and wordy creating log jams partly because they were set low so if anyone leaned over to look at an object they blocked them. Add to that the fact that quite often they were a distance from the item they were discussing so you had to play a game to match the object to the label. There were some beautiful objects and plentiful use of intricate painted scrolls and prints. I think my favourite object was this charming small dish dated 1700-50 which I felt could be a contemporary shop. I also loved a book described as an I-Spy book for processions to enable people to identify the different clans as th...

Fascinating small exhibition at the British Museum highlighting a medieval ewer and its journey to Africa and back. Made in England between 1340 and 1405, the ewer later travelled to West Africa. In the 1880s it was photographed in a courtyard of the royal palace of the Asantehene, king of the Asante people, in Kumasi (in present-day Ghana). During the Anglo-Asante War of 1896 it was looted by British forces and later purchased by the British Museum. A second ewer, also taken in 1896 and shown in the same photograph, was presented to the Prince of Wales's Own (West Yorkshire) Regiment. This display reunites the two. It was amazing how one object could tell a little-known story of medieval trade, how English objects had been treated as sacred items in Africa and Victorian colonialism.   Closed 7 June 2026

Interesting exhibition at the Royal Academy focusing on the 17th century artist, Michaelina Wautier. The modern galleries at Academy had been decorated in dark colours to give an atmosphere contemporary to the art. It began by explaining how Wautier worked with her brother so sometimes their work is indistinguishable from each other and over the years some of her work has been attributed to him. The first room looked at the pairs' portraits with some lovely examples from each of them. It then moved on to religious and mythical work in rich Baroque colours before focusing on her major work "The Triumph of Bacchus" and other allegorical pieces. It was lovely to see another female artist being brought into the spotlight as I had done a lecture on the roots of feminist art history in the week however this show also got me thinking about how many artists generally have been forgotten or marginalised in favour of the well-known Old Masters as I had not only not heard of Mi...

Surprising exhibition at the Royal Academy on the art of Rose Wylie. From the pictures I'd seen in the press I'd assumed the work would look quite flat and cartoon like but in the flesh it was quite textured and the explanations made me realise it was a lot more nuanced that I'd assumed. I was also surprised at how huge a lot of the pictures were. The show was arranged in themes from her work influenced by being a child in the Second World War through to that which has been inspired by newspapers and current cultural themes. I admit the audience were all of a certain age (mine!) and mainly female and from conversations around me I realised they were engaging with the work and getting a lot from it. I am going to hear Wylie speak in a few weeks and I am looking forward to hearing more from her. Closed 18 April 2026 Reviews Times Guardian Telegraph

Clever online lecture from the National Gallery looking at horses in art. Chiedza Mhondoro, assistant curator at Tate Britain, discussed the idea that how horses are shown in art reflects our relationship with them and the different roles they play. The talk was a little repetitive to begin with as she laid out those roles but came together when she returned to them with examples of three or four works of art and examples of each. It might have been better to combine the discussion of the roles and the examples from the start for clarity. The roles she covered ranged from agricultural use, transport, role in conflict, mythology, literature, recreation and sport and their place in the human imagination. She used a good range of examples from Stubbs to contemporary art.